D-Day: Penetrating the Atlantic Wall David C. Hanson, Virginia Western Community College
The Second World War began in Europe on September 1, 1939 and officially ended with the surrender of Germany on May 8, 1945. (In Asia the war ended four months later when Japan surrendered.) But any real possibility that Germany might win the war ended in 1941, when Hitler declared war first on the Soviet Union in June, then on the United States in December--just five days after the Soviet Army launched its counteroffensive on the Eastern Front. While British and American forces prepared for the inevitable invasion of Nazi-occupied France via the English Channel, the German Wehrmacht and the Soviet Red Army pounded away at each other like two battered heavyweights. By 1943, Nazi Germany had conquered more territory than it could defend, and a large part of Hitler's Army--one million men--had been killed or captured by the Red Army. From then on, Hitler's best hope was to hold on long enough to inflict enough casualties on the Red Army that Stalin--who was growing increasingly impatient with his British and American allies--would negotiate a peace based on a division of Eastern Europe. (In the end, more than six million Soviet soldiers and at least twice as many civilians were killed by the war, compared to the American toll of 400,000 soldiers and virtually no civilians. Roughly four million German soldiers died in battle and at least that many died from other causes.)
In short, Hitler's goal from 1941 on was to buy time, not to achieve victory, but to avoid a crushing defeat. As Hitler put it in a 1943 directive, Germany could sustain further casualties and loss of territory in the East (in "the bitter and costly struggle against Bolshevism"), but a successful Allied landing in France would be "a mortal blow to Germany's chance for survival." (Of course, what Hitler could not have known, indeed no one could have known, was that even if D-Day had been a total failure, Germany eventually could have been destroyed anyway with the fruits of the Manhattan Project.) Perhaps the ultimate importance of D-Day, then, was preventing Hitler from strengthening his forces in the East and pressuring the Soviets to abandon their Western Allies and accept a truce. Clearly, the stakes were high: arguably the outcome of the war, and the fate of Europe, hung in the balance.
Stephen Ambrose sums up the Allies' challenge succinctly: "to land, penetrate the Atlantic Wall, and secure a lodgment in an area suitable for reinforcement and expansion." For the Germans, the problem was "how to hurl the coming invasion back into the sea" [Ambrose, D-Day, p.28]. As early as March 1942, Germany had begun to fortify the French coast with enough concrete, steel, artillery, and men to hold up the invasion, seal off any penetration of the Atlantic Wall, and smash the invaders with a quick counteroffensive led by panzer (armored) units.
Erwin Rommel
In November of 1943 Hitler assigned responsibility for strengthening the Atlantic Wall to Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. Having made his reputation as a panzer division commander in the defeat of France, and then as commander of the Afrika Korps, Rommel's strength was in bold offensive tactics; but he quickly sized up the situation. "It is on the beaches that the fate of the invasion will be decided," he declared. He immediately went to work directing the construction of more fixed fortifications. The first line of defense consisted of underwater mines; next came steel obstacles called "hedgehogs" designed to rip open the bottom of landing craft [see photo]; then came trenches filled with machine gunners at several levels along each bluff; then on the plateaus above were concrete artillery placements connected by a network of underground tunnels. In between each line of defense Rommel placed barbed wire, land mines, antitank ditches, and cement barriers. These fortifications were built to withstand the aerial bombings and naval bombardments that Rommel correctly predicted would precede the landing of infantry, who would be caught in a deadly crossfire of machine guns, heavy artillery and mortars.
Still, Rommel knew the best he could do was hold up the assault long enough for mobile infantry and panzer divisions to launch a counterattack. To pull this off, Rommel had to have these divisions within quick striking distance. The problem for Rommel was how to defend every conceivable landing site with insufficient reinforcements and limited mobility. This problem was compounded by the German command structure. It was never clear whether Rommel, Field Marshall Gerd von Rundstedt (Commander in Chief West), or Hitler himself was in command of the panzer divisions. On D-Day, June 6, 1944, this proved to be a fatal weakness.
Dwight Eisenhower
In December 1943, a month after Rommel took command in Normandy, Roosevelt appointed General Dwight Eisenhower to command the Allied invasion. With nearly twenty years of experience as an army staff officer, "Ike" was masterful at military administration and logistics. Unlike Rommel, an impatient and aggressive commander who distained "desk work" and won battles with daring maneuvers, Ike was a cautious, calculating strategist who won his battles with overwhelming force.
For the Allies, perhaps the most important key to success (Ambrose calls it "the sine qua non of the operation") was the element of surprise. Because of the numerous points of vulnerability along the Atlantic Wall, the Germans had to anticipate the landing site in order to strengthen that particular point and concentrate enough reinforcements nearby. Hitler and Rommel were convinced that Pas-de-Calais was the most likely place for the Allied invasion because the English Channel is narrowest there and because it would open a direct route to the Rhine-Ruhr (and on to Berlin). This was a logical assumption, and so it became an important part of the Allied strategy. An elaborate deception known as Operation Fortitude was conceived to divert the Germans' reinforcements and attention toward Pas-de-Calais and away from the real invasion planned for Normandy, Operation Overlord. The imaginary invasion force consisted of poorly concealed rubber tanks, fake wooden bombers and facilities built by stagehands from film industries. General George Patton was placed in command of the imaginary invasion force to impress the Germans, who were monitoring radio communication. The deception was so effective that when reports of the real invasion began to come from the Calvados and Cotentin coasts of France on D-Day, Hitler and the German commanders insisted that Overlord was merely a diversion [see photo].
As Ambrose points out, "Thanks to their control of the sea and air . . . the Allies had unprecedented mobility. They would choose the time and place the battle would be fought" [Ambrose, 41]. Once the battle began, however, the advantage would shift to the Germans. The Germans had the strategic advantage of fighting on the defensive--with fixed fortifications, plus established lines of communication, supply and reinforcement. The success of Operation Overlord depended on three factors: utilizing the element of surprise, quickly establishing a secure beachhead, and isolating the region from German reinforcements. The latter was achieved, to some degree anyway, through the use of strategic bombing [see photo] and the French Resistance to paralyze the French railway system [see photo]. In addition, airborne divisions were dropped behind enemy lines on the eve of the invasion to disrupt and confuse the Germans and prevent a concentrated counterattack [see photo].
On June 5, 1944, after bad weather forced a frustrating false start and delay, Eisenhower gave the immortal order, "OK, let's go" [see photo]. It is easy to regard the outcome as inevitable and to underestimate the importance and difficulty of the challenge. Operation Overlord was a colossal effort and, despite some serious mistakes, an unqualified success. In one night and day, 175,000 men and their equipment, including 50,000 vehicles, were transported across a hundred miles of open water and landed on a heavily fortified shore, at a cost of only 6,600 U.S. casualties. They were carried or supported by over 5,300 ships and boats of all types and almost 11,000 airplanes [see photo]. The invasion front stretched over sixty miles [see map]. The Germans had taken four years to build the Atlantic Wall, and the Allies penetrated it at every landing site. Except for Omaha Beach, where the going was toughest and the American casualties were by far the heaviest, it took less than an hour for the Allies to break through. Once a secure beachhead had been established, it was only a question of how soon and at what cost an Allied victory in Europe would be achieved [see photo].* Germany's fate was sealed.
*In May of 2000 I had the opportunity to visit Normandy as part of a faculty/student exchange program between Virginia Western and the lycee Le Verrier in Saint-Lô. Some of the most intense combat after the D-day landing was at Staint-Lô, a key city in the next phase of the operation. At a cost of approximately 100,000 casualties (including 40,000 U.S. soldiers, 59,000 Germans, and 1,000 French civilians), the city was liberated, and nearly destroyed, in July 1944 [see photo]. Visiting places like Utah Beach, Point-du-Hoc, Arromanches, Ste.-Mere-Eglise, the Memorial at Caen, and the American cemetery at Omaha Beach [see photo] gave me the understanding and inspiration to write this brief overview of D-day. I am especially grateful to my host and good friend, Professor Jean-Paul Legravey, for his hospitality and wisdom during my stay in St. Lô. In addition, I would like to salute my father-in-law, Joe Peters, who was one of the many American soldiers who took part in the liberation of St. Lô [see photo] and the defeat of Nazi Germany.
D. Hanson
July 6, 2000